US orders airstrikes against ISIS targets in Somalia
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(WASHINGTON) — The United States used manned fighter jets to conduct an airstrike against Islamic State targets in Somalia on Saturday, three U.S. officials told ABC News on Saturday.
President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed the airstrike, claiming no civilians were harmed in the attack. No details were released about the targets aside from the president labeling the target as a “Senior ISIS Attack Planner.”
Hegseth said the airstrikes were carried out “at President Trump’s direction and in coordination with the Federal Government of Somalia.”
Notably, the strikes were not drone strikes but were carried out by fighter aircraft from the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, which is currently in the Red Sea, as well as Air Force fighter aircraft, U.S. officials told ABC News.
And unlike other airstrikes, these attacks were offensive airstrikes against ISIS, not the defensive drones strikes, such as what U.S. forces have done against al Shabaab when they’re called in to support Somali troops who are being attacked by the militant group.
“This action further degrades ISIS’s ability to plot and conduct terrorist attacks threatening U.S. citizens, our partners, and innocent civilians and sends a clear signal that the United States always stands ready to find and eliminate terrorists who threaten the United States and our allies, even as we conduct robust border-protection and many other operations under President Trump’s leadership,” Hegseth added.
(WASHINGTON) — The House of Representatives on Friday votes to elect a speaker for the new Congress.
Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican who ascended to the leadership post in 2023 after the historic ouster of Kevin McCarthy, has secured President-elect Donald Trump’s support as he seeks reelection.
But Johnson’s handling of the government funding fight just before Christmas angered some of the GOP’s right flank. Depending on attendance, Johnson may only be able to lose one Republican vote.
What happens if the House can’t elect a speaker
The House can’t conduct any business without a speaker, including swearing in members.
If the chamber can’t come to an agreement before Monday, the certification of Trump’s 2024 election victory could be thrown into chaos.
The House and Senate will convene on Jan. 6 for a joint session of Congress for a finalization of the results of the presidential race, a constitutionally mandated responsibility for lawmakers.
Johnson insists he’s not making deals for the gavel
Despite days of closed-door meetings with Republican holdouts, Johnson insists he’s not cutting any deals to win them over.
“My simple message to my colleagues is make suggestions about process and improvements. We are open to that at all times. But I don’t make deals with anyone,” he said.
“There’s no quid pro quo here,” Johnson added. “I don’t do anything in exchange for a vote other than commit to make this institution work as effectively and efficiently as possible.”
In the previous Congress, McCarthy was forced to meet Republican hardliner demands to be elected speaker after a four-day voting process. One of those demands — a lower threshold to bring a motion to vacate — led to his downfall just seven months later when he was forced out of leadership by a small group of GOP members.
Johnson’s message to GOP: ‘We don’t have time for drama’
Johnson had a simple message for his conference ahead of the vote.
“We don’t have time for drama,” Johnson told reporters.
Johnson said he was speaking with members and urging them to be unified so they can quickly get to work on Trump’s agenda.
“This election is not just about one person. It’s about moving forward with the America First agenda. A mandate was given by the American people — the electorate — President Trump got 77 million votes. The House Republicans got almost 75 million. Thats a record number. They are expecting us to get to work,” Johnson added.
What Johnson is thinking
Johnson expressed confidence in winning the speaker vote as he entered the Capitol on Friday.
Asked by ABC News if he will be successful in the first round, he replied: “I think so.”
But privately, House leadership sources say they’re also preparing for the very real possibility of a bruising floor fight, going multiple rounds of voting.
In 2023, it took McCarthy 15 rounds of voting and several concessions to be elected speaker.
Johnson has been adamant he won’t make any backroom deals to keep his job. And moderate Republicans have been publicly cautioning Johnson against giving too much away to the further-right undecided votes.
-ABC News’ Jay O’Brien
Trump wishes Johnson luck
Trump is doubling down on his support for Johnson, and said a victory for Johnson would be a “big win for the Republican Party.”
“Good luck today for Speaker Mike Johnson, a fine man of great ability, who is very close to having 100% support,” Trump wrote in an early morning post on his social media platform.
“A win for Mike today will be a big win for the Republican Party, and yet another acknowledgment of our 129 year most consequential Presidential Election!! – A BIG AFFIRMATION, INDEED. MAGA!”
How the House speaker vote works
The House will meet at 11:00 a.m. for legislative business and then officially convene for the start of the 119th Congress at 12:00 p.m.
At noon, there will be a quorum call to determine how many members are present and voting. With the GOP’s razor-thin majority in the House, Johnson needs almost every Republican vote to win.
The election for speaker is expected to take place between 12:45 p.m. and 1:00 p.m.
Read more about what will happen on the first day of the new Congress here.
Johnson’s future uncertain as he fights for reelection
Johnson has publicly expressed confidence that he will retain the speaker’s gavel, but spent the final day before the vote on Capitol Hill meeting with Republican holdouts.
Several House Freedom Caucus members were spotted at his office, many leaving the hourslong meeting dodging questions from reporters. The few who did speak said they thought they were making progress but none had committed to voting for Johnson.
Meanwhile, Trump’s team and the president-elect himself were working behind the scenes this week to strike a deal with one GOP hardliner in particular — Rep. Chip Roy of Texas — sources told ABC News.
(WASHINGTON) — The House voted at 1 p.m. Tuesday on the Laken Riley Act, passing the bill as its first piece of legislation of the 119th Congress on a vote of 264 to 159.
Forty-eight Democrats voted in favor of the bill.
“Laken Riley was brutally murdered by an illegal alien that President Biden and the Democrats let into this country with their open border policy,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement after the vote. “It is hard to believe after countless horrific stories like Laken’s, ANY House Democrats would vote against deporting illegal aliens who commit violent crimes against American citizens.
“But 159 just did, demonstrating some Democrats have ignored the loud and clear message from voters in this election who demanded secure borders, the deportation of violent illegal aliens, and laws that put the safety and security of the American people first,” he added.
Reintroduced by Georgia Rep. Mike Collins, a Republican, the legislation pins Riley’s death on the Biden administration’s open-border policies and grants power to attorneys general to sue the federal government if they can show their states are being harmed over failure to implement national immigration policies. The measure also allows states to sue the Department of Homeland Security for harm caused to citizens allegedly due to illegal immigration.
The bill was named after Riley, a nursing student who was murdered by illegal immigrant Jose Ibarra while jogging on campus at the University of Georgia. Ibarra was sentenced to life in prison for the murder.
“The only thing President Biden did after Laken’s tragic death was apologize for calling her murderer an illegal,” Johnson said ahead of the vote. “That’s outrageous. We all know the real victim here was young Laken. There are real consequences to policy decisions. This one was deadly.”
The House previously passed the bill in March by a vote of 251-170, with 37 Democrats voting in favor. The bill was expected to pass again with bipartisan support.
“House Republicans heard the voices of those who wanted change and voted to pass the Laken Riley Act,” Johnson said Tuesday. “We will always fight to protect Americans, and today’s success is just the beginning of Republican efforts to undo the catastrophic damage caused by years of the Democrats’ failed leadership.”
The measure now heads to the Senate, where Majority Leader John Thune teed up a procedural vote on the Laken Riley Act, which could occur as soon as this week. It will be one of the first legislative actions taken by the new Senate.
The bill will need 60 votes to advance through the upper chamber. Even with the Republicans’ new 53-vote majority, it could prove difficult to court the necessary Democratic support to advance it.
So far, only one Democrat, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, is reportedly co-sponsoring the bill, which is being led in the chamber by Sens. Katie Britt, R-Ala., and Ted Budd, R-N.C. It is unclear whether there will be requisite Democratic support to clear the Senate.
The Senate, under Democratic leadership last session, never considered the act as a standalone bill. But it previously considered the Laken Riley Act when Senate Republicans forced a vote on it as an amendment to a sweeping government funding package in March. The amendment was considered as a government shutdown loomed, and changes to the bill would have likely forced a government shutdown.
No Democrats voted for it at the time, though it later earned the support of Montana Sen. Jon Tester, who lost reelection to Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy.
(WASHINGTON) — Executive orders signed recently by President Donald Trump state that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs prioritize diversity over merit in hiring, claiming DEI efforts are an “immense public waste and shameful discrimination.”
Some experts in the DEI field disagree, and several tell ABC News that diversity, equity and inclusion programs are aimed at creating a true merit-based system, where hiring, salaries, retention and promotions are decided without bias or discrimination toward employees.
Before the anti-discrimination legislative movement of the 1960s — including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 — discrimination against certain groups was widespread, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“If you were from a dominant group — generally white people, generally men, straight, cisgender, fully-abled — you had a huge leg up in terms of getting employment recommendations, higher pay promotions,” Erica Foldy, a professor at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, told ABC News.
She continued, “So, Trump and his allies are harking back to this time that they say was more merit-based, but that’s not at all how these organizations operated.”
DEI initiatives — like implementing accessibility measures for people with disabilities, addressing gender pay inequity, diversifying recruitment outreach, or holding anti-discrimination trainings — are intended to correct discriminatory organizational practices, experts say.
DEI experts argue that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are “on the path of creating more merit-based companies, more merit-based firms,” Foldy said, aiming to ensure that qualified people of all backgrounds have an “equal chance of being hired; you’re going to be paid the same as employees at comparable levels.”
“Business as usual, without attention to discrimination, is deeply, deeply inequitable,” Foldy said.
Amri Johnson, a DEI expert and author, told ABC News that the ideal of meritocracy operates under the assumption “that opportunities are fair.” Today, studies across industries continue to show that discrimination against a person’s race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, military background, or other factors continues to permeate the job market.
“If organizations truly want the best talent, companies need to be intentional about how they source and engage with talent,” said Johnson.
Each year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission plays a role in hundreds of legal cases concerning ongoing discrimination against protected classes in the workplace.
The EEOC’s 2023 performance report offers a long list of lawsuits it settled or won that year. One lawsuit noted blatant racist graffiti or comments made by fellow employees, paired with the discriminatory designation of hard physical labor solely for Black employees; others noted the failures of several employers to make reasonable accommodations for pregnant or disabled workers that led to the employee’s termination or job offers rescinded.
One study found that racial and ethnic discrimination in hiring continues to be a problem globally.
“Relative to white applicants, applicants of color from all backgrounds in the study had to submit about 50% more applications per callback on average,” according to research from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that analyzed 90 studies involving 174,000 total fake job applications tweaked to include racial indicators but with otherwise similar professional credentials.
“Diversity doesn’t go away because DEI goes away. It is an inevitable part of any human community (business or otherwise),” said Johnson. “Not learning how to deal with its tensions and complexity is leaving value on the table.”
Some DEI experts point to research from management consulting firm McKinsey & Company that found that companies with more diversity financially and socially outperform those that are less diverse.
“The most successful companies understand that DEI isn’t just a ‘”nice-to-have,'” said Christie Smith, the former vice president for inclusion and diversity at Apple, in a written statement. “It’s a driver of innovation, talent attraction, and competitive advantage. The question is whether leaders will have the courage to stay the course and hold firm against political headwinds.”
On Thursday, Trump claimed, without citing evidence, that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration were partly to blame for the tragic plane and helicopter collision in Washington on Wednesday night.
The accusation comes after Trump signed sweeping orders aiming to terminate “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” programs in or sponsored by the federal government and its contractors.
The White House argues that DEI programs “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”
“Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great,” reads Trump’s executive order.
The order revokes several decades-old or years-old executive actions, including the 1965 Equal Employment Opportunity order prohibiting hiring discrimination by federal contractors and its amendments expanding professional development, data collection and retention opportunities.
The order also explicitly revokes a 1994 order to develop environmental justice strategies that address disproportionately high health and environmental impacts faced by low-income or minority communities.
Among the list of orders that are now revoked is a 2011 order requiring federal agencies to develop strategies “to identify and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity.”
Those in favor of axing DEI programs argue that these initiatives could lead to lawsuits claiming discrimination following the Supreme Court’s ruling on SFFA v. Harvard that disallows race to be taken into consideration in college applications.
The National Center for Public Policy Research has been a strong advocate against DEI, submitting shareholder proposals to reverse the DEI policies at major companies like Costco, John Deere, and others. Ethan Peck, deputy director for the NCPPR’s Free Enterprise Project, told ABC News that such companies should be “colorblind.”
“We’re saying that companies have an obligation, a legal obligation, and an obligation to their shareholders, and an obligation to their employees to treat everybody the same, regardless of their race and sex, and we’d submit any proposal to keep that that way,” Peck said.